This Book Is About Me

Randle Browning reviews Emily Adrian’s new work of autofiction, “Daughterhood.”

By Randle BrowningNovember 5, 2024

• Memoir & Essay

• Fiction

• Nonfiction

ONE SUBSET OF the growing canon of motherhood literature examines the unstable boundary between mother and child, a division perhaps most obscured in new motherhood, a time of intense physical and psychological intimacy. In theory, it’s simple: the baby is inside, part of the maternal body, and then the baby is outside, a separate being—but in practice, this borderline is negotiable.

Intimacies and repeated acts of care blur the separation between caretaker and child. When my own daughter was small, she needed proximity to me on an almost hourly basis. Sometimes, when I wore her strapped to my chest in a sash, I bent down to kiss her head and found that I had kissed the back of my own hand. At other times, I caught myself rocking, only to realize I wasn’t holding the baby but myself, or a bag of groceries. “Every mother knows it, that swaying,” Leslie Jamison writes in her 2024 memoir Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story, “Sometimes you will see a woman doing it instinctively, her arms empty.”

This blurriness comes up again and again in writing on motherhood. “During the early months of [my daughter’s] life outside the womb,” writes Lucy Jones in Matrescence: On the Metamorphosis of Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Motherhood (2024), “it started to become clear that she had never completely left my body.” In her 2024 nonfiction study Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change, Angela Garbes remembers the close experience of having her ears cleaned by her mother: “There’s no distance between us; I inhale her scent; am one with her heat.” No distance. And yet, despite the intimacy possible in the caretaking bond, we are not one. As soon as my daughter left my body, I saw that she was unknowable to me, her interior unreachable.

Emily Adrian’s new book Daughterhood occupies this paradoxical and shifting nexus between parent and child. Adrian is the author of five novels, two of which—The Second Season (2021) and Everything Here is Under Control (2020)—hinge on the experience of new motherhood, but Daughterhood is an unconventional, hybrid work. It draws on traditions of memoir, autofiction, and reporting, and excavates, in lean prose, the tumultuous transition from being a child to being a mother—including all the ways the two can both support and fail each other. Using early COVID-19 lockdown–era video interviews as source material, the narrator pieces together a partially speculative portrait of her mother Ellen, who came of age in the controlled atmosphere of a 1970s Mormon community in the American West. Adrian alternates between novelistic scenes from Ellen’s past and a present-day writer-narrator who analyzes the story and how she tells it. She questions her motives in excavating Ellen’s past life (“Do I believe that by recording your life, I am writing history?”) and fights the urge to compare Ellen’s deft caretaking to her own choppy foray into new parenthood. “I wanted to know why motherhood had saved you, and why it was wrecking me,” Adrian writes. The narrator can’t help comparing Ellen’s warmth to her own bouts of anger and frustration with her young son, Wes, who struggles at a prestigious preschool due to behavioral issues she doesn’t know how to interpret.

Adrian might have written a compelling memoir that lingered in the space of mother-daughter comparison, or even one that grappled with the disorienting echo chamber of the self, imploding under the pressures of new parenthood. Interestingly, she chose instead to decenter her own experience as a mother and to focus on Ellen in the years before she had her children, a period Ellen calls “the hardest part” of her life.

Ellen gets neither “affection from her mother [n]or attention from her father”; her parents are two pragmatic farmers with “more children than they could convincingly love.” “The earliest memory I have of my mom is her pushing me away when I was distraught,” Ellen says in one of the video calls. After enduring abuse and neglect in her childhood home, Ellen attends the only college her parents will pay for—one in Rexburg, Idaho, that offers classes on marriage and religious doctrine and enforces a strict dress code. She faces two failed attempts at marriage and recovers from emergency abdominal surgery alone despite asking for her mother’s help.

Despite these trials, Ellen mothers with grace. “I can count on one hand my memories of you raising your voice at me,” the narrator writes of Ellen, “Your love for me was palpable. […] I knew it was unconditional; you didn’t have to tell me.” In one call, the narrator tries to defend her grandmother LaVerne’s emotional unavailability. “I ramble about the fact that your mother had seven children.” But in the playback, it is clear that she is “trying to say something—or avoid saying something” about herself. “In your description of LaVerne,” the narrator reflects, “I recognize my own coldness.”

In this way, and however much the present-day narrator insists she doesn’t “want to become the main character of this story, even temporarily,” it becomes clear that Adrian cannot write her mother’s history—she can only write her version of it. The book hinges on the narrator’s position as daughter. “If my goal was to write a memoir about your life instead of mine, haven’t I failed?” Adrian’s narrator reflects. “This book is about me.” The line echoes another: “It is hard to write about my own mother,” notes Adrienne Rich in the 1976 essay “Motherhood and Daughterhood.” “Whatever I do write, it is my story I am telling, my version of the past.”

Both the sentiment and the echo itself are significant. Literature interested in this shifting borderland between parent and child has a tendency to return to some of the same ideas and phrases, even the same sources. Psychologist D. W. Winnicott’s theories of the mother as container, someone who can give a child a sense of wholeness, crop up again and again—perhaps most notably in Maggie Nelson’s 2015 book The Argonauts. So does feto-maternal microchimerism, the phenomenon in which cells from the fetus remain in a mother’s body long after birth (Jazmina Barrera mentions this in her 2020 book-length essay, Linea Nigra: An Essay on Pregnancy and Earthquakes). Both concepts appear in Jones’s Matrescence, where they trouble the point of separation between mother and baby and outline the work of self-denial a mother must undertake to support the child’s development. I have written them into my own manuscripts.

This sense of repetition can be destabilizing, but it is a recognizable phenomenon of mother-writing. In my own work, I’ve noticed a pattern: I uncover some new way into my experience as a parent, I write a fragment about it, and then I find that another writer has done the same in the last 10 years—with the same urgency, and often with uncanny similarity at the level of prose. The sequence itself appears relatively common. In Christina MacSweeney’s 2022 English translation of Linea Nigra, Barrera writes, “I’ve never been so strongly in favor of decriminalization of abortion as now, when I’m pregnant. […] I think this, and I write it, and then I read the very same thought in The Argonauts: ‘Never in my life have I felt more pro-choice than when I was pregnant.’” Abortion crops up in Daughterhood as well. Ellen, who clings to the pro-life values she inherited from Mormonism, only begins to relax her stance when her daughter, the narrator, is pregnant.

These narrative patterns mirror the actual experience of becoming a mother. A new parent can see with sudden clarity that they are just one step on a long staircase, one wave in a growing pattern of ripples. But being a duplicate, just one instance in a pattern, is not so different from its ostensible opposite—erasure. A new generation can seem to replace you before you’re even gone, or a loss can make you suddenly aware of the link in the chain that you occupy. In Michelle Orange’s 2021 book Pure Flame: A Legacy, it’s the death of a nonagenarian grandmother that sparks a reckoning with the author’s own mother. What’s more, the mother is, at least in dominant Western culture, in a position of service, sublimating their own needs to prioritize the child’s, and often the whole family’s. In The Light Room (2023), Kate Zambreno writes of mother characters as ghosts exhausted from this labor, of her own mother-writing as practically translucent. In June Jordan’s 1981 essay “Many Rivers to Cross,” it’s not clear on the mother’s deathbed whether she is alive or dead. Her survivors “cannot possibly pinpoint” her death, since “she [has] died so many, many times,” depleted from her lifetime of care work, made far more punishing for her as a Black woman in the United States.

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A writer of motherhood and daughterhood can end up caught between two impulses. The first is to turn back toward the self and seek to establish a stable and unique identity beneath and apart from the repetitive cycles of care work, and distinct from predecessors or children. This is a noble and critical pursuit, especially in the cases of mothers who are further marginalized based on their race, class, disability, or otherwise. The second impulse is to look back toward the one who came before, to strain to see her more clearly. Daughterhood follows this second path. In turning her gaze toward her own mother, Adrian’s narrator is forced to reckon with the parts of Ellen that she failed to see before having Wes and before she began writing the book.

This is where Daughterhood is most thrilling and the logic of its title most significant. I have situated Daughterhood in a landscape of “mother books,” but the specific work of the project is in becoming more conscious of the position of the daughter. Many memoirs linger in the stunned space of new motherhood and in the scramble to reestablish a sense of self—my own writing often takes up this task—but Adrian’s narrator tries, instead, to offer that realness back to Ellen.

Critically, this is not something that only happens in looking backwards. When Ellen admits that she’ll miss the interviews with her daughter during this period, the narrator feels “vaguely aggrieved” that she might owe a debt of attention. She has approached the video calls as a practice related to her art-making, not as something she did for her mother—Adrian risks turning Ellen into a source, rather than a subject. “Too often, I have ignored you,” the narrator admits. “I dare you to need nothing from me, to be my mother forever,” she writes.

The narrator realizes that she has expected her mother to be someone without needs, a perpetual container, like Zambreno’s ghostly figures. And she has been. In one version of what it means to raise someone well, a parent and child operate under a power imbalance in which the adult, who has more agency, is also the responsible one—at least when things go well. Daughterhood is one part thank-you letter to a mother who achieved this, who made space for the narrator to become herself. There are echoes here of Winnicott’s “good enough mother,” the one who can make a child feel safe and held. “If there’s a limit to my understanding of you as separate from me, there’s no limit to my understanding of myself as your daughter,” Adrian writes. “My life happens within yours, its weather and terrain—a truth I have never felt more acutely than out here, beneath this sky, these mountains.”

In this book, the landscape of the geographical West often stands in for this specific feeling of freedom within the mother’s protective container. The narrator experiences that container as trust, and as space for spreading out. “Your trust in me […] made possible the best events of my life.” Another echo: She recalls how Ellen supported her when she dropped out of high school to follow a less worn path, and the narrator sees that her own son needs the same kind of freedom—she takes Wes out of his constricting preschool and embarks on a four-month residency in the remote California desert, where Wes blossoms. Importantly, the narrator is able to shake off the containment she doesn’t want from Ellen: religion. “You wanted to give me God and the West. I only needed one,” she writes.

Despite disagreeing with Ellen about the strict moral codes she held on to after leaving Mormonism, the narrator tends not to press her too hard on that topic. Ellen evolves in her relationship to religion, though, and importantly, the narrator makes space for this. “I have regrets about the culture I immersed our family in,” Ellen confesses. “I wish I hadn’t done that.” These shifts startle the narrator, but she realizes she is only frightened by “the extent to which you’ve allowed yourself to change.”

Daughterhood avoids a critical trap here. In creating a portrait of Ellen, Adrian risks memorializing Ellen’s years before she became a mother as her “real life,” and thereby undercutting the validity of her present. One example of this effect is Mothers Before: Stories and Portraits of Our Mothers as We Never Saw Them, a 2020 anthology of photographs and poignant essays collected by novelist Edan Lepucki about contributors’ mothers before they had children. The book is powerful, but it’s hard to flip through it without mourning the mothers’ vibrant former lives, which seem like the realest versions of themselves. The versions who came after seem muted by contrast, even if the subjects went on to rich and fulfilling futures. Adrian’s narrator expresses discomfort with this aspect of her book—“Traditionally, a writer waits for her mother to die before eulogizing her in a memoir”—but she catches herself before freezing Ellen in the past. “I wanted to make you realer than real,” she writes. “Now I understand this project relied on an assumption—one I would never make about myself or someone my age. I assumed you were done becoming who you are.”

Turning this humanizing lens toward Ellen works, paradoxically, to validate both the mother’s and the daughter’s experiences. If it’s not possible to see your mother clearly, Daughterhood suggests, it is important for everyone involved that you try. “I meant to reveal our relationship,” Adrian writes, “with all its familiar tensions and particular intimacies, but of course I also changed it.” What she makes room for is a more expansive narrative, one filled with possibility and with “new rules,” one that allows them both to occupy their positions within the matrilineal pattern, still knowing and loving each other in their specificity.

Adrian is not the first writer engaging this blurred space between parent and child to paint a forgiving portrait of her mother. In Maya Angelou’s 2013 autobiography Mom & Me & Mom, the author’s mother, Vivian Baxter, though absent in their early life, finds redemption and respect in her children’s eyes as they change and grow. And Adrian is not the first to point out the particular charge between mothers and daughters. Another oft-cited passage in the mother-writing tradition, and one I have often turned to, comes from Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (1976): “The cathexis between mother and daughter […] is the great unwritten story,” one riddled with “smoldering patches of deep-burning anger,” Rich writes. “The materials are here for the deepest mutuality and the most painful estrangement.”

In one of Daughterhood’s pivotal moments, Ellen describes, over video, her longing for LaVerne’s care. LaVerne did the best she could, Ellen concludes, but it was not enough. The narrator clocks this insight as “the unavoidable, illogical trap of motherhood: it doesn’t matter what we’re capable of doing. It only matters what we do.” By the end of the book, Adrian’s narrator feels the pain of this distance—between the mother we need and the mother we get—for everyone involved. One way to interpret the title Daughterhood is in light of this gap, and the realization that being a child sometimes means asking for more than is available.

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Daughterhood is a book full of binaries, but it tends to complicate them. It tries to be about Ellen, for example, yet ultimately lands not quite on the narrator but somewhere nearby—the narrator’s Ellen. Both Ellen and the narrator zigzag across the content. They ping between “here” and “there” but manage to spend time, through the loophole that is Zoom, together in a shared space, co-creating a picture of the past. The book also bounces between “now” and “then”: Adrian uses the past tense in her portraits of young Ellen and the present tense when she analyzes the writing of it, though the two modes don’t stay firmly in their separate timelines. Adrian slips in and out of tenses, sometimes jumping into the future. Similarly, while Ellen’s sections are written in third person and Adrian’s in second person—Ellen is the implied “you”—these distinctions get slippery. And the narrator repeatedly troubles her role as documenter versus storyteller: “It’s tempting to write in scenes that didn’t happen—to give you what you never got.” But even when she tries to stick to the facts, they shift. If she repeats a question, Ellen doesn’t answer the same way every time.

Almost every binary that appears in Daughterhood ends up subverted, or at least questioned. A mother can hold you but suffocate you, or she can set you free but fail to support you. And then there’s the third, redemptive possibility—that a mother can both hold space and make space. If Rich, in flagging the “unwritten story” of this fuzziness between mothers and children, is calling for a canon, then we are on our way to building one. Daughterhood’s particular contribution to this canon lies in its attempt to hold both sides at once: there is the daughter’s perspective, and there is the mother’s, and there is an imperfect zone somewhere in the middle, with room for both.

At times, I longed for Daughterhood to go even further, to look beyond the individualist project of selfhood, of staking out “my version” versus “yours,” of focusing on what we claim for ourselves rather than what we might share. It’s wise to question the either-ors that come up in mothering discourse. Even “mother” is a complicated term. Can’t any caretaker and any person depending on them end up constellated in just this way?

We could even go one step further. Might the individualist impulse to focus on the self—either a daughter’s or a mother’s—get claustrophobic? As Zambreno reflects in The Light Room, “The self is a kite sometimes without a string, growing tinier and tinier, until sometimes it vanishes.” Zambreno recalls another writer viewing mothers as not a portrait but a landscape, which is to say a background for another to live their life over. But perhaps another question to ask is whether or not we can exist in a shared landscape. “Collective feeling,” a term Zambreno uses, is another kind of balm for this swinging between “me” and “you.”

In the same way, perhaps the binary of self-erasure versus self-creation is not as binding as it seems. The important thing might be, instead, to keep allowing for change. “There are new rules” to Ellen and the narrator’s relationship by the end of Daughterhood. The writing of the book has shifted their dynamic irrevocably. But, Adrian writes, “I don’t know if I trust either of us to follow them.”